Template:Selected anniversaries/December 15
1791: The United States Bill of Rights becomes law when ratified by the Virginia General Assembly.
1802: Mathematician and academic János Bolyai born. He will be one of the founders of non-Euclidean geometry.
1832: Engineer Gustave Eiffel born. He will design the world-famous Eiffel Tower.
1836: A fire at the U.S. Patent Office destroys all 10,000 patents and several thousand related patent models.
1857: Engineer George Cayley dies. He did pioneering work in aeronautics, investigating and codifying the dynamics of flight.
1958: Theoretical physicist Wolfgang Pauli dies. Pauli received the Nobel Prize in Physics for his "decisive contribution through his discovery of a new law of Nature, the exclusion principle or Pauli principle".
1970: Soviet spacecraft Venera 7 successfully lands on Venus. It is the first successful soft landing on another planet.
2000: The third reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant is shut down.